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Consider Yourself an Expert? Think Again

Earlier this month, the New Yorker published a brilliant piece detailing the glamorous yet gullible world of expert wine-tasters. The article profiled one blind tasting after another, highlighting perhaps what advertisers knew all along: for so-called experts and amateurs alike, our expectations of wine are often more important than what’s actually in the glass.

“This was nicely demonstrated in a mischievous 2001 experiment led by Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux,” writes Jonah Lehrer. “In the first test, Brochet invited fifty-seven wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.”

In fact, the look of a label or the price on the bottle profoundly influence the tasting experience.

Said Lehrer: “The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle bore the label of a fancy grand cru, the other of an ordinary vin de table. Although they were being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the bottles nearly opposite descriptions. The grand cru was summarized as being “agreeable,” “woody,” “complex,” “balanced,” and “rounded,” while the most popular adjectives for the vin de table included “weak,” “short,” “light,” “flat,” and “faulty.”

Quite remarkable, eh?

It looks as though these so-called wine experts are not only fooling themselves into thinking they have an extraordinarily nuanced palette, but they’re also fooling everyday consumers into believing so-called expert advice on taste and pairings. Even if we were to believe their palettes were able to discern marginal differences among a broad range of tastes, as a recent study by Penn State’s sensory evaluation center suggests, are such “experts” qualified to make meaningful recommendations to the rest of us who lack such abilities?

Reading this article reminded me of a 2009 op-ed by New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, in which he argued that “so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise.” Citing a number of examples to prove his point, I particularly enjoyed this one:

Said Kristof: “The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about. The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

According to Tetlock, “It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience.”

As a society, we put an enormous amount of trust into the advice and insight of so-called experts, and yet it seems to me that the word itself has been utterly stripped of its authenticity. What does it really mean to be an expert anymore? Indeed, you can still find so-called scientific experts trying to refute climate change. Perhaps this is what led to the explosion of crowdsourcing information and ideas, for if the experts keep getting it wrong, the rest of us together can probably get it right.

What worries me the most is that we have a natural inclination to trust those who are branded as experts, even before they open their mouths, and this is a dangerous tendency in a world where experts have the accuracy of a chimp playing darts.

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Excellent article, People, there can not be Experts on any subject in this world, an individual or a organization could only become and demonstrate themselves only as Professionals with experience and knowledge,

While I think these principles hold especially true for ‘experts’ in fields as subjective as wine tasting, I find it hard to believe a guy like Warren Buffet is simply ‘throwing darts’ and gained his riches merely by falling on the side of favor within statistical margin of error time and time again.

I agree with you on that front: consistency is a hallmark of true expertise. The problem I’m trying to address is that the notion of being an expert nowadays has devolved into something far less impressive.

Absolutely. I think as a public, we need to be more discerning about our ‘experts’ and how much trust we allow them. It also helps if we hold these purported experts as accountable for their missteps as we champion their successes.

As both Kristof and Tetlock propose, we need to develop a way of monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I remember Arianna Huffington once pleaded that we need a real-time fact checker at the bottom of the TV screen when politicians and “expert” commentators speak. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Great article Rahim, totally smiling at your notion of devolution “where the experts have the accuracy of a chimp playing darts.” Especially appreciate your observation, “Perhaps this is what led to the explosion of crowdsourcing information and ideas, for if the experts keep getting it wrong, the rest of us together can probably get it right.” When we express different opinions, even argue, not for the greatest egoistic profit or in order to be right, but in order to better clarify the truth, we see how every individual senses and interprets the truth from his or her own point of view; perhaps, by rising above our own individual calculation (evolving even just slightly), we will reach a state where we will actually discover the truth…together.

1) The power of priming is insane. Priming is the psychological phenomenon when a person’s experiences are molded by their expectations. Experts are considered so because of their vast knowledge of their subject matter, but they are still people who are vulnerable to biases. The wine test is clearly proof that priming is a powerful bias, rather than “no expert can be trusted.”

2) People are notoriously bad at predicting the future, but statistical significance is key. I cannot agree with your statement that experts are only about as good as “chimps throwing darts,” because it’s a meaningless statement. If experts are able to make a statistically significant amount of predictions better than just a random guess, than their experience is valuable in cases where that amount of statistical significance is enough. You’ve used the case of experts’ predictions in politics, what about in business? Are short term predictions more valid than long term? Tetlock’s book work is fascinating, but I’m not entirely sure you are using it in proper context.

I have a science background, so maybe I take special offense to the notion that there is no such thing as an expert. I’ll completely grant you that we must be careful about our information’s sources and that no self proclaimed expert is worth anything with out a proven body of work. However, I feel you are cherry picking a bit here to prove a point that really cannot be proven.

Thanks for your thoughts. I really don’t mean to imply that “no expert can be trusted”. The piece definitely leaned towards that end in order to provoke thoughtful reflection on the very notion of an “expert” to begin with, but your points are well-taken. As you noted, “no self proclaimed expert is worth anything with out a proven body of work,” and that perhaps is my greatest point. Without a detailed track record, accountability is far out of reach. I believe that the world of science is far more “stable” as far as predictions go, than, say, the world of politics. Business, on the other hand, seems a lot more tricky.